Abstract
Despite living for 50 years after beginning his “Elysium Britannicum” in the 1650s, John Evelyn (1620–1706) failed to complete what was meant to be a masterwork on gardens. The exceptionally complex manuscript left behind was only published in a heroic edition by John Ingram in 2000. Why did Evelyn embark on the work and why didn’t he complete it? This essay suggests that the initial project developed in a uniquely unstable intellectual, religious, and political moment, in which Evelyn felt free to respond to neo-Epicurean physics and philosophy. As order returned, Evelyn found himself unable to accept the worldview implied by neo-Epicureanism but also unwilling to publish a revised version that denied conclusions his contemporaries were coming to accept. Evelyn’s response is contrasted with that of the plant anatomist Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), who was also aware of the radical implications of neo-Epicureanism, but whose social and religious circumstances were markedly different.
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Notes
- 1.
(Charleton 1657: 51). In his fictionalized discussion, Charleton (1619–1707) represents Evelyn as Lucretius .
- 2.
The phrase “the world turned upside down” comes from a ballad of the later 1640s, opposing the suppression of Christmas festivities and rituals by the Parliamentary government. But it has its modern resonance as the title of a book by the historian Christopher Hill (1972), which has the subtitle, Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Geoffrey Parker (2013) argues that the scope of the disruption extended not just beyond the British Isles to Europe, but indeed worldwide.
- 3.
- 4.
Rebecca Bushnell makes a valiant attempt to find more depth in the workmanlike English publications of the age before Evelyn (Bushnell 2003). However, their intellectual weight seems limited, despite her advocacy.
- 5.
See Edmund Waller ’s use of this metaphor, below, in his commendatory poem introducing John Evelyn ’s partial translation of Lucretius ’s De rerum natura.
- 6.
John Ingram ’s successful attempt to create a modern publication of the “Elysium” was not the first: there had been at least two previous attempts. A glance at the surviving manuscript will reveal why the creation of an edition proved so difficult: sheets are full of deletions, insertions, and corrections; pages have been removed, pages added; passages and new information are on slips of paper, originally pasted into place but now floating within the folder, unsure of place. John Ingram ’s edition will surely be refined over time, but we should recognize his labour as heroic.
- 7.
Hartlib Papers (Sheffield University) 28/2/66B-67A.
- 8.
The Royal Society was formed after the Restoration, and one of its principal sections was the “Georgical Committee”, of which Evelyn was the principal early member. The term “terraculture” dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century; its advantages are well described by (Otten 1985: xiii and xix, n. 1).
- 9.
- 10.
Evelyn was not alone in adapting his style to suit the likely reception of his ideas. See Anthony Grafton’s comments on Athanasius Kircher ’s “deliberate ambiguity and complex wit” when publishing views on historical time that conflicted with Biblical chronology (Findlen 2004: 183).
- 11.
Charleton had probably visited the exiled Stuart court in Paris, perhaps meeting Evelyn there and with him many of the leading English and French pioneers of new intellectual and scientific approaches. Like Evelyn, he felt the force of Epicurus ’s natural philosophy; like Evelyn, he was conscious of the challenge Epicurean ideas mounted to traditional Christianity; and he set out to render it compatible in works such as The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652), Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (1654), and Epicurus’s Morals (1656). He was the perfectly-placed foil for Evelyn’s own ideas.
- 12.
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Leslie, M. (2016). “Without Design, or Fate, or Force”: Why Couldn’t John Evelyn Complete the Elysium Britannicum?. In: Fischer, H., Remmert, V., Wolschke-Bulmahn, J. (eds) Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period. Trends in the History of Science. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26342-7_3
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